In a recent piece for The Unpopulist, I argued that being anti-state isn’t the same thing as being pro-liberty, and that libertarians should put more weight on the latter. Today I want to follow up by looking at one way anti-statism can go wrong: when the urge to cut government outpaces a plan for how to do it.
Suppose you think the state should be much smaller than it is. It doesn’t follow that any cut is good, or that we should just start hacking away with a chainsaw at a stack of programs. The details matter — and they’ve rarely been thought through. Libertarians, classical liberals, and conservatives have all made the case for a smaller state. But what we still lack is a theory of how to shrink it.
The most obvious task for such a theory will be to distinguish between those government programs that should be eliminated from those that shouldn’t. Of course, this is also where we will find the most well-trodden divisions between established political theories. Those on the political left will want to keep or expand most existing welfare programs and environmental regulations, for instance, but maybe to cut corporate welfare and military spending. Moderate libertarians like me will want to cut or eliminate some but not all of the above. And anarchists are happy to put the whole turkey on the chopping block.
But it’s once we get past these initial questions that things get more interesting, and complicated. Because even if we could all agree in theory what an ideal government would look like, the fact that we need to transition there from where we are makes the whole process much more difficult and morally fraught.
For instance, suppose you thought that there’s no principled reason why government should be in the business of regulating food and drugs. Or caring for the poor and elderly. Or whatever. Maybe the market or civil society could do those things just as well if not better. Even still, it doesn’t follow that if you could push a button and eliminate those functions today that you should do so.
Why not? Consider the following (incomplete) list of the problems with which a theory of shrinking the state would need to grapple.
(1) The Expectations Problem - Even if you think a particular government program shouldn’t exist, the fact that it does exist arguably creates a reasonable expectation among people that it will continue. That reasonable expectation, in turn, arguably creates both moral and pragmatic reasons for a gradual transition, rather than an immediate one. The most obvious example here is something like Social Security, where immediate abolition would seem to be both unfair and disastrous in its effects. That said, there’s a lot more to say about this issue. What makes an expectation “reasonable” rather than “unreasonable”? My sense is that there is a moral dimension to reasonableness, not merely an epistemic one. I’d want to say that slaveholders did not have a reasonable expectation that slavery would continue in 1860. Or, alternatively, even if they did it is not one that ought to have carried much weight in deliberations about how and when to abolish the institution.
(2) The Distributional Problem - Suppose the state has a bunch of policies which, in theory, ought to be abolished. These policies impose costs and benefits on different groups, with some policies conferring net benefits on one group, other policies benefiting some other group. Now suppose that a reformer arrives and starts eliminating some, but not all, of these policies. But the policies he cuts are all ones that benefit group X, while the policies he keeps are ones that benefit group Y. Even if, like me, you’re skeptical about most claims of distributive justice, you’ll probably think there’s something objectionable about this situation. It seems to run afoul of the idea of equal treatment that is central to the rule of law. Still, there are puzzles here. If the government is unjustly coercing everybody, and then shifts to unjustly coercing only 20% of the population, is that better or worse? How do we balance the concern to minimize coercion with the belief that when state coercion is applied, it ought to be applied in a way that is compatible with norms of equal treatment and non-discrimination?
(3) The Vacuum Problem - It’s tempting to think that when we abolish government programs or agencies that we are destroying power. The reality, however, is that power is never really created or destroyed. It is merely redistributed. Sometimes, to be sure, that redistribution can be enormously beneficial. Taking power from the state and putting it into the hands of ordinary people is almost always good, both in terms of giving people more control over their lives and in terms of avoiding the dangers inherent in concentrated, centralized authority. But ending a government program doesn’t always mean that power goes back to the people. Sometimes, the vacuum created is filled by powerful private interests (think Russian oligarchs after “privatization”). And sometimes it is filled by other elements of the state, as when the weakening of independent federal agencies is used to concentrate power in the hands of the unitary executive. As Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rusenblum write in their important book, Ungoverning, sometimes “what replaces governing is not more freedom but the arbitrary rule of personal will.” See also Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein’s recent book, The Assault on the State, along with this fascinating Reason interview with Mark Pennington about his new book on Foucault and classical liberalism.
(4) The Politics Problem - As an effort to dramatically cut back on wasteful government spending, DOGE was a failure. Some of my libertarian friends were surprised that Musk wasn’t able to do more. But they shouldn’t have been. DOGE was never about reducing government spending in the most effective way possible. DOGE was a political operation, and everything it did was shaped and constrained by the political needs of the administration it served. “Condoms for Gaza” had nothing to do with shrinking the state. But it sent exactly the right signals to the president’s MAGA base — and that was the point.
Most readers of this Substack will be familiar with the ways that public choice theory explains the growth of government programs. Public choice theory teaches us that government programs grow because they invite rent-seeking — and rent-seeking shapes policy to benefit insiders rather than the public. But here’s the problem: the same forces operate in reverse. Just as the growth of government is determined by political factors that have little to do with the public welfare, so too will any effort to shrink government be shaped by those same factors. There is no magic button that allows us to avoid the political problem.
I don’t pretend to have ready-made answers to every question I’ve raised here. I wrestled with some of them in a paper about ten years ago, but most of the work remains to be done. What DOGE showed us is that it’s possible to cut government in ways that are shallow, partisan, and ultimately counterproductive. We probably won’t see another initiative like DOGE for some time. But when it comes, we should be ready with something more than slogans, stunts, or ideological purity tests. Shrinking the state without a plan is just vandalism; doing it right is the harder, but ultimately much more important work.